There was a moment, a few weeks back now, when the sky over the Swartberg turned the colour of an old bruise, and something in the air told every creature on this ranch to take shelter.
And then it came, tap dancing ever so loudly on the tin roof of my home. It wasn’t one of those polite little showers we have learned to be grateful for, but real rain, generous rain, rain that hasn’t visited this mountain and the valley’s below in longer than any of us have cared to count.
It fell so hard and so long that the dry riverbeds, those pale sandy scars that wind through the veldt like old memories, filled with a furious force and ran to became rivers again, right there in front of us, as if the land itself had been holding its breath and had finally been told it was safe to let go.
I stood on the stoep and watched water move across ground that had forgotten what water was. Lance came out to stand beside me and neither of us said anything for a long while.
There was nothing that needed saying. We were simply watching the Karoo remember Water.
This Dream Karoo has been teaching me about Resilience and the Way of the Water.
Because it did not take long.
Within days, the veldt that had been the colour of my rusks with morning coffee and the red dust unbeknownst to me , was scattered with Namaqualand daisies, orange and white, pushing up through ground that gave no warning they were even there.
These sleeping seeds may have been waiting years, some of them, for exactly the delight and surprise they are giving me. They are tough as honey badgers, these daisies. Nothing about the Karoo asks permission to be beautiful. It simply waits for its moment, and then it insists.
The gwarrie bushes have gone from grey-green to a green so alive it looks borrowed from somewhere else, and the birds know it before we do.
I sit on the garden bench in the mornings and watch tiny sunbirds, no bigger than my thumb, aquamarine and shimmering with long trailing tails, flitting from one gwarrie to the next, feeding, calling, catching light like something more jewel than bird.
I’ve been told by Koos one of the elders in the community, a dear old man with a crinkled wizened face from too much Karoo sun, that in the Afrikaans language these birds are called Jangroentjie meaning “Little Green John”.
Lance says they must be the messengers sent by ”John” to announce the greens arrival. He has a hilarious sense of humour that way. Imagine a modern day John sending out green messages!
I think they have simply come out of hiding to celebrate along with everything else.
And then, one early morning this past week, another astounding thing happened on our afternoon stroll, something moved in the grass that I have never once seen yet. in all 7 months of our time here.
Long ears first, and then a shy, quick shape, gone almost before I trusted my own eyes. The riverine rabbit. The most endangered mammal in South Africa, they say, secretive beyond reason, and there it was, out in the open, drawn out by the green that the water had sent and, I like to think, the birds too, small messengers of mercy doing John’s work long before we noticed.
Here is what I am learning, my love and the rivers keep underlining it for me: what looks barren isn’t always empty.
It is only waiting. The seed is there in the dry ground long before the rain comes. The rabbit is there in the veldt long before you ever see it. The colour is there under the red dust the whole time, patient, holding on, honey-badger tough, waiting for its moment to be undeniable.
We do this too, I think.
We hold what matters through our own dry seasons, clenching tight, stubbornly hanging on with a hope and a prayer, not knowing when the rain will come, only trusting that it will, and that when it does, we rise, each of us in the way this whole Mountain and the Valleys below, has risen. Everything becomes unreasonably alive, impossibly colourful, more resilient than we ever gave ourselves credit for.
The rivers have gone quiet again, sunk back into the sand the way Karoo rivers do. But the daisies are still here. The sunbirds are still feeding in the Gwarrie. And somewhere out on the path, that elusive long-eared rabbit, whom I think I will name Robert ( a story for another time) is still moving through Karoo bossies that remembers for now, what it means to be green.
This Karoo does not stay dry forever. It only asks you to trust that the rain is coming, even when the ground gives no sign at all.
May you find your own rain this week my love. It is closer than you think.
SharynAnn
There was a moment, a few weeks back now, when the sky over the Swartberg turned the colour of an old bruise, and something in the air told every creature on this ranch to take shelter.
And then it came, tap dancing ever so loudly on the tin roof of my home. It wasn’t one of those polite little showers we have learned to be grateful for, but real rain, generous rain, rain that hasn’t visited this mountain and the valley’s below in longer than any of us have cared to count.
It fell so hard and so long that the dry riverbeds, those pale sandy scars that wind through the veldt like old memories, filled with a furious force and ran to became rivers again, right there in front of us, as if the land itself had been holding its breath and had finally been told it was safe to let go.
I stood on the stoep and watched water move across ground that had forgotten what water was. Lance came out to stand beside me and neither of us said anything for a long while.
There was nothing that needed saying. We were simply watching the Karoo remember Water.
This Dream Karoo has been teaching me about Resilience and the Way of the Water.
Because it did not take long.
Within days, the veldt that had been the colour of my rusks with morning coffee and the red dust unbeknownst to me , was scattered with Namaqualand daisies, orange and white, pushing up through ground that gave no warning they were even there.
These sleeping seeds may have been waiting years, some of them, for exactly the delight and surprise they are giving me. They are tough as honey badgers, these daisies. Nothing about the Karoo asks permission to be beautiful. It simply waits for its moment, and then it insists.
The gwarrie bushes have gone from grey-green to a green so alive it looks borrowed from somewhere else, and the birds know it before we do.
I sit on the garden bench in the mornings and watch tiny sunbirds, no bigger than my thumb, aquamarine and shimmering with long trailing tails, flitting from one gwarrie to the next, feeding, calling, catching light like something more jewel than bird.
I’ve been told by Koos one of the elders in the community, a dear old man with a crinkled wizened face from too much Karoo sun, that in the Afrikaans language these birds are called Jangroentjie meaning “Little Green John”.
Lance says they must be the messengers sent by ”John” to announce the greens arrival. He has a hilarious sense of humour that way. Imagine a modern day John sending out green messages!
I think they have simply come out of hiding to celebrate along with everything else.
And then, one early morning this past week, another astounding thing happened on our afternoon stroll, something moved in the grass that I have never once seen yet. in all 7 months of our time here.
Long ears first, and then a shy, quick shape, gone almost before I trusted my own eyes. The riverine rabbit. The most endangered mammal in South Africa, they say, secretive beyond reason, and there it was, out in the open, drawn out by the green that the water had sent and, I like to think, the birds too, small messengers of mercy doing John’s work long before we noticed.
Here is what I am learning, my love and the rivers keep underlining it for me: what looks barren isn’t always empty.
It is only waiting. The seed is there in the dry ground long before the rain comes. The rabbit is there in the veldt long before you ever see it. The colour is there under the red dust the whole time, patient, holding on, honey-badger tough, waiting for its moment to be undeniable.
We do this too, I think.
We hold what matters through our own dry seasons, clenching tight, stubbornly hanging on with a hope and a prayer, not knowing when the rain will come, only trusting that it will, and that when it does, we rise, each of us in the way this whole Mountain and the Valleys below, has risen. Everything becomes unreasonably alive, impossibly colourful, more resilient than we ever gave ourselves credit for.
The rivers have gone quiet again, sunk back into the sand the way Karoo rivers do. But the daisies are still here. The sunbirds are still feeding in the Gwarrie. And somewhere out on the path, that elusive long-eared rabbit, whom I think I will name Robert ( a story for another time) is still moving through Karoo bossies that remembers for now, what it means to be green.
This Karoo does not stay dry forever. It only asks you to trust that the rain is coming, even when the ground gives no sign at all.
May you find your own rain this week my love. It is closer than you think.
SharynAnn
